


Family

by LaLaCat1



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Andrea lives, F/M, Fix-It, Sexual Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:54:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21712564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaLaCat1/pseuds/LaLaCat1
Summary: Andrea wasn’t stupid. She knew this stranger on her doorstep claiming to need her help with Jesse wasn’t to be trusted, but Jesse was like a drug Andrea had no intention of quitting. He was family. She’d do what she had to do to keep her family safe.
Relationships: Andrea Cantillo/Jesse Pinkman, Todd Alquist/Jesse Pinkman
Comments: 17
Kudos: 63





	Family

**Author's Note:**

> I got sucked into Breaking Bad again after the Netflix movie came out and now I can't get it out of my head. All I could think, as I was rewatching it, was how many times there were small decisions that, had even one thing changed, could have altered the whole course of the show. This is one of those small decisions--what if Todd didn't shoot Andrea on her doorstep. What if Andrea got to show her resourcefulness? 
> 
> Please note: this story contains graphic violence. Mostly physical, however, there are mentions of sexual violence as well. Nothing goes beyond what's depicted in the show itself. That said, I want to be sure you're aware of this before you get into the story. There is character death as well, but everyone who dies ends up dead in the show as well.

Andrea hesitated to open the door when she heard the knock. It was late and dark. But this was a good neighborhood. Her next-door neighbor was a dentist. Nothing bad had happened since she and Brock moved to this part of town. So, against her better judgment, she cracked the door open. Standing under the glow of her porch light was a guy around her age—mid-twenties, blond, dark eyes. He smiled at her, looking up from under his lashes in a bashful way. It was a smile that radiated quiet embarrassment like he too was aware of the hour but had no other choice than to stand there before her.

Andrea instantly felt her stomach twist. The self-deprecating smile reached the man’s eyes but did nothing to warm them. She told herself the instant fear in her chest wasn’t justified, but in the back of her mind alarm bells went off that she couldn’t quite silence.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“You’re Andrea, right?” the man replied.

She forced her eyes not to narrow when she heard her name come out of his mouth. She knew she’d never seen this man before in her life—she would have remembered those dead fish eyes—so how did he know her?

She thought fleetingly of the PTA at Brock’s new private school and the new teachers she was still trying to familiarize herself with. It was possible that this man had something to do with the school, but she highly doubted it.

_How would you know?_ the ever-present little voice in her head asked. _You never saw a school like Brock’s before Jesse took you there to tour it._

She absolutely hated that little voice. It was never wrong, but it somehow always skewed the facts. Yes, Jesse was the one to show her the school, and he was the one who helped pay for the ridiculously high tuition, but she was the one who did the research. She was the one who looked up scholarships to apply for, so Brock would be able to stay at the school when Jesse eventually decided he was done playing house and moved on. Jesse might have shown her the door, but Andrea was the one who figured out how to keep that door propped open.

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

The man’s smile turned more pleased than embarrassed for a moment. He ducked his head, scuffing the tip of his shoe across the outer edge of her welcome mat before looking up at her.

“I’m sorry to come by so late, ma’am, but I could sure use your help,” he said, like one of those good old boys from the nice part of town that used to stop by the diner where she worked. Those men always wanted more than a quick meal. They tended to assume she’d be happy to help them with that want.

She didn’t care anymore if this guy was from Brock’s school or if he’d been sent by the Pope himself. Now that the comparison between him and those men was in her head, Andrea was done with this conversation.

“I’m sorry,” she said, moving to close the door, “I don’t--”

The man placed his palm flat against the wood, fingers curling around the doorknob to stop her from closing the door in his face. Her stomach did an unpleasant somersault of unease.

“It’s about Jesse Pinkman.”

She knew a name alone shouldn't have this much of an effect on her. It’d been weeks since she and Jesse broke up, and over a week since his friend Walter stopped by the house asking Andrea to make that phone call. She hadn’t heard anything from Jesse, his lawyer, or Walter since she made her call and it was eating at her. The worry kept her up at night, slipped into her brain when she wasn’t expecting it, resurfaced when it had no business making her heart ache.

Jesse was a drug, just as addictive as the meth used to be. The only difference was that Andrea had no real interested in kicking the habit he represented.

“Is Jesse okay?” she asked before she can stop herself.

The guy gave her a wide-eyed look and shook his head, slow and sad. That ache in her chest sprung up, hard and fast. She bit her lip, weighing her options, before pulling the door closed to unclip the latch. When she opened the door again, the guy had stepped to the side to give her room to join him out on the front porch. He looked guilty, an overgrown child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. It was a cold night and neither her pajama pants nor her bathrobe was very heavy, but the chill in the air wasn’t what made her shiver.

Andrea eyed the blond guy with more hesitation than she wanted to display, but the feeling was out there already and she couldn't lock it away now that she’d let it out. Not when this was about Jesse.

“Is he alright?”

The blond guy shook his head. “I don’t think so, no, ma’am,” he said gravely. He hesitated a moment, eyeing her critically for the first time. It made Andrea want to shout at him. How dare this man come to her house and then try to judge her?

“I think he’s using again.”

Walter said the same thing to her a week ago. She hadn’t believed Walter then, and she didn’t quite believe this stranger now. In the absence of any other reason for Jesse to ignore her calls, though, there was nothing she could do but accept this warning as a legitimate concern.

As if sensing her disbelief, the blond guy pointed to a red SUV across the street and three doors down. She couldn't see the interior clearly, just the dark shadows shifting behind the tinted windows.

“I actually brought him here with me,” the man said. “He’s right in that car. He’s real messed up, ma’am. I think it’d do him real good to see you right about now.”

Andrea took a step, then another, until she was at the edge of her front porch. She wasn’t stupid. She didn’t know who this guy was. She wasn’t about to go running across the street to a parked car in the dead of night with him just because he said someone she knew might be sitting in the back seat. But, still, if Jesse really was in that SUV, after all these weeks of silence…

“Maybe you can pull the car up closer to the house.”

A soft, metallic click filled the open space behind her. She knew what that sound was, would know the sound anywhere. She’d never used a gun before, but she’d grown up in a neighborhood full of them. Brock’s father had one, before things turned out bad for him. Andrea knew that sound even without the cold press of metal pushed into the back of her skull.

She had one brief moment to think, _Thank you, God,_ when she realized Brock was with her grandmother tonight before the man behind her spoke.

“I want you to know, it’s nothing personal,” he said.

Andrea said nothing. She was afraid if she opened her mouth all that would come out was a scream, and she knew a scream would get her killed faster than silence. She went very still. Adrenaline rushed through her, turning her body numb, but that was alright. It helped. It let her shut off every single part of her brain except for that little voice.

The little voice told her she was not going to die tonight.

“I want you to walk with me, real casual, over to my car and then you and me are going to say hello to Jesse. Alright?” the man asked. His voice was soft and calm, almost soothing.

It made Andrea want to vomit.

“That sound good to you?” he asked when she didn’t respond.

Andrea nodded. She stepped off her front porch.

It felt like a very long time passed between leaving her yard and walking to the SUV. As she got closer, she became aware that the engine was running. There was someone seated behind the wheel, the dark outline of their body clear through the tinted glass.

Someone other than Jesse.

Some part of her hoped Jesse wasn’t in the SUV at all, hoped he was tucked away somewhere safe and happy. That same part of her hoped Jesse wasn’t returning her phone calls because he’d finally decided he was done playing house with her and Brock. The rest of her, the logical part of her that told Andrea she would do whatever was necessary to survive this long walk, knew he was going to be in the car. That logical part of her had been warning her since the moment she met Jesse that something like this was going to happen.

For a while, she’d been able to convince herself the warning in her bones was because Jesse was an addict too. She let herself believe that lie until the night Jesse went with her to identify Thomas’s body. She saw the look on Jesse’s face then. She didn’t need him to tell her why the men who killed her brother were dead two nights after Thomas’ murder. She wasn’t stupid. Jesse had something to do with their death.

But, after Thomas’s death, Andrea hadn’t cared if Jesse was a killer because it felt like he was the good guy. He was the vigilante, bringing her family justice. She was glad those men were dead.

She wondered, as she came to a stop beside the SUV, if Jesse was going to have a hand in her death as well.

“Go ahead,” the man behind her said encouragingly. “Go on in.”

This close to the SUV, Andrea could see through the windows. Jesse was in the back seat, face pressed up against the glass. There was a thick cloth gag between his teeth, tied in a tight knot behind his head. She could still hear his muffled screams. He looked like a wild thing, thrashing in the back seat, a rabid dog ready to bite.

The hand she stretched out to open the door shook.

She told herself to ignore the shaking.

The second the door was open, Jesse threw himself at the man behind her, howling. Andrea felt that press of the gun against the back of her head like a red-hot brand. If she moved, Jesse’s face would be in the line of fire.

The first time she and Brock went to dinner with Jesse flashed through her mind. He’d made Brock laugh. Brock hadn’t laughed since Thomas stopped coming home. The memory of how Jesse looked at her from under his lashes, that smile shy and small but so desperately earnest, still made her heart flutter.

Andrea planted her feet. She caught Jesse as he barreled into her. She dug the fingers of her left hand into his shoulder and went immediately for the knot tied behind his head with the right.

Before she could do more than brush her fingers against the fabric, another man loomed out of the darkness in the back of the car. He wrapped his hand around Jesse’s neck.

“Wow there, boy,” he said over Jesse’s cries. He yanked backward and dragged Jesse deeper into the darkness.

Andrea never thought of Jesse as a physically fragile man. He wasn’t the biggest or the most muscular man she’d ever been with, but those things had never really appealed to her anyway. He was strong enough to lift her up off her feet whenever she wanted him to, and he was strong enough to carry a sleeping Brock from the car to his bed without struggling. He didn’t tell her no when she wanted to take the lead when they were together, even looked excited the few times she’d been confident enough to push him down onto the mattress. But now, as she watched the man lift Jesse like a misbehaving puppy, all she could think of was the very breakable nature of necks.

“Miss Andrea, I’m going to need you to get into the car now,” the man behind her said. His voice remained just as pleasant as it had been since she opened her front door, but there was menace resting just beneath the placid calm.

_You will survive this_ , Andrea told herself as she climbed into the back of the SUV.

Pressed against the opposite end of the bench seat sat a man twice Jesse’s size with long hair slicked back and a close trimmed mustache. He had Jesse in a bear hold as Jesse kicked and thrashed and screamed behind his gag. The light was too low to make out clear details, but even still Andrea could see that one side of Jesse’s face was covered in cuts and bruises, his left eye half swollen shut, his clothes covered in blood. She told herself not to look down to see how much of the blood from his face now stained her baby blue bathrobe. His hands were cuffed behind his back, another set of cuffs around his ankles.

“Keep going,” the blond man instructed and it was only then that Andrea realized she’d frozen in fear before fully entering the SUV. The pointed press of the gun barrel into her side sent Andrea scrambling the rest of the way into the back seat. The man climbed in behind her and slammed the door.

“Todd, I thought you were going to kill her out there,” said a voice from the front of the car.

Another man twisted around from the driver's seat to glair back at the blond man pressing himself up against Andrea’s side. The driver was older than either of the other two men, his hair a mix of gray and black. His face was hard, the prominent jaw jutted out as he gnawed on an unlit cigarette.

He didn't even look at Andrea as he added, “You shoot her in here, and you’re going to be the one who has to clean up the mess.”

Jesse screamed something behind his gag and pitched himself forward at the waist. It took Andrea a second to realize he was trying to shield her. The man restraining him laughed at Jesse’s struggles as the driver gave a dry cackled. He reached back to flick Jesse on the forehead before turning around and pulling away from the curb into the night.

Andrea could feel her heart beating in her ears, the rushing sound of her panicked breath echoing like ocean waves in her head. She told herself to calm down, just calm down. She wasn’t dead yet. She wasn’t dead and neither was Jesse.

_You will survive this._

The man with the gun, Todd, shifted beside Andrea. His arm slid around her waist and yanked until he’d pulled her onto his lap, the bulk of her weight resting between his widespread thighs. The shift forced her to look at Jesse. Across from her, the man with the mustache dug his fingers into Jesse’s jaw so hard his nails drew blood. He forced Jesse to face Andrea.

“Now, now, lover boy, you gotta keep an eye on this,” he said.

Jesse was crying, his eyes so wide and terrified she didn’t think there were any coherent thoughts left in him. His clothes were a mess, his face was a mess, his whole body looked beat to hell. Andrea felt a sob try to work its way up and out of her throat. Two weeks. Jesse had been missing for two weeks. She understood that these men were the ones who took those two weeks from him, she just didn’t know why.

Behind her, the man—Todd—nodded slowly to the man restraining Jesse. The man let one brow arch speculatively. Todd nodded again, more firmly this time. The action shifted the gun. It rubbed back and forth across the side of her skull.

The man with the mustache yanked the gag down, his fingers catching on Jesse’s bottom lip, hard.

A line of fresh, bright blood trailed after the man’s hands. Jesse didn’t notice.

“Please,” Jesse gasped. He struggled against the man’s hold, tears washing clear tracks through the blood and dirt on his face. “Please, please. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll cook for you, I’ll cook. I’ll--”

“Jesse--” Andrea started. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say, just that she needed him to stop talking in that broken way. Her eyes burnt. She jerked against Todd’s hold, but the arm around her waist was like iron.

The man with the mustache slapped Jesse so hard his head bounced off the hard plastic back of the passenger front seat. Andrea started to scream, but she swallowed the sound down. Jesse made a wounded animal sound of pain, but he didn’t stop babbling.

“Todd, I swear, I swear--anything you want, I’ll do anything, just don’t hurt--”

“Shut that pussy ass crybaby up or I’ll do it myself,” the driver growled from the front seat.

The man restraining Jesse laughed as he yanked the gag back into place. Jesse shouted louder, kicking and struggling, but it made no difference. The man was bigger than Jesse. He shouldn’t have been able to restrain his captive so easily, but there was something wrong with Jesse. Something beyond the obvious, something that made his eyes slide out of focus for a moment as he jerked his head back and forth. The man dug his fingers into Jesse’s jaw once more. This time he pulled Jesse back against his chest, sliding his arm across Jesse’s belly to dig his fingers into the exposed strip of flesh between Jesse’s shirt and pants.

The touch was possessive. It was meant to hurt.

“Stop--” Andrea croaked, but the gun trailed down her neck and suddenly her voice stopped working.

“Now, Jesse, I told you that you had to be good,” Todd said behind her. He had the gun pressed up against Andrea’s side now, above her left kidney. “There gotta be consequences if you don’t behave or you’re never going to learn.”

Jesse tried to shake his head, but the grip on his jaw was too tight. He was hyperventilating behind the gag, his chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow gasps. Andrea couldn’t look away from the fear she saw there, the absolute mindless terror. No one was that afraid of a threat they hadn’t seen carried out before. These men had killed people, probably people that Jesse knew, while Jesse watched.

Andrea shut her eyes. There was no stopping the tears that rolled down her cheeks. She didn’t want to die. There was so much, so very much, she still needed to do, so much that she hadn’t said to Brock or her grandmother. She didn’t want to die in front of Jesse.

“I told you,” Todd said, “it was going to be her or the little boy if you didn’t behave and then you went and misbehaved, so now I gotta do this.”

Andrea opened her eyes.

These men would not hurt her son. She was not going to die. She was going to keep her son safe. She was going to keep Jesse safe.

If it was the last thing she ever did, she’d protect her _family_.

“I sent Brock back to my mother in Mexico,” she said. Her voice was little more than a whisper but that was alright. Todd was close enough to hear.

He shifted the arm locked around her waist to press his palm against her shoulder. The entirety of his arm rubbed against her chest, between her breasts, pushing the edge of her bathrobe off one shoulder as he tipped her against his chest to look into her eyes. His face screwed up in childish frustration.

“Is that true?” he demanded. “Really?”

Andrea nodded, too terrified to answer out loud.

“If you’re lying to me, I’m going to hurt Jesse really, really bad before I kill you,” Todd said, again like he was advising a child not to eat cookies before dinner. “I won’t like it, but I will. I’ll pull every nail off his fingers. Slowly.”

“Brock went back to visit my mother with my grandmother,” Andrea said. Her lips were numb. Every inch of skin where Todd touched her felt like it was being eaten away by acid. “He’ll be gone all winter break. My grandmother isn’t going to bring him back here if I vanish.”

Todd’s face scrunched up like he’d smelt something bad. She heard another click as the safety slid back into place on his handgun before Todd shoved it into the waistband of his pants. At the front of the SUV, the driver began to laugh uproariously. Todd let her sit up. Across from her, Andrea watched as a spark of understanding crossed through Jesse’s eyes like a comet shooting through space, there and gone but bright for the second it lasted. Behind him, the man with the mustache leaned forward. He set his chin on Jesse’s shoulder, causing Jesse to flinch violently which, in turn, caused the man to laugh.

“What now, Toddy Boy? Your little pet’s getting awfully complicated; I say we dump them both.” The man stroked his fingers down Jesse’s neck. Jesse shuddered. “If you really want to make your point, there are other things we can do with her before we put a bullet in both their heads.”

The man’s eyes lingered at the junction between neck and shoulder Todd had unwittingly exposed at Andrea’s neck. She refused to let herself react to that look, refused to let herself acknowledge it at all, but it was obvious both Jesse and Todd understood what that casual appraisal meant. She watched Jesse’s eyes go somehow even wider, his skin so pale in the passing streetlamp light that he might as well be a corpse.

Todd rubbed his knuckles up and down along her ribs as he thought. She didn’t think there was anything sexual about the touch for him, it seemed more like he was trying not to spook her while he decided if he was going to kill her. She thought maybe he wouldn’t, not right away, if it meant he might lose leverage over Jesse.

_Think_ , she told herself. _Think_. _If we get to wherever these men are trying to take us, we’re going to die._

When Brock got sick and Jesse told her to ask the doctors about poison, two FBI agents came to speak with Andrea. They told her they just wanted to know more about Jesse, just wanted to be sure that her son was safe, but Andrea hadn’t really believed them. In her experience, law enforcement wasn’t looking out for people like her.

Except, one of the agents, Detective Kalanchoe, actually came back to see Andrea after Brock was on the mend. He gave her his business card and told her he wanted her to know she could call him whenever she needed it. He said he’d answer, day or night, if she ever worried about her safety or the safety of her son.

Andrea memorized the number on his card and then threw it away.

She didn’t know if there was a cell phone in the car, but she did know the location of at least one gun. She’d never used a gun before, but she knew how they worked. She knew exactly how to flip the safety off if she could get her hands on it.

But then what?

There were three men in this car who wanted to hurt her and Jesse. Presumably, all three of these men were armed. She only knew where Todd had his gun because he didn’t think she was a threat. If she could get a gun, and she called Detective Kalanchoe, would the detective help?

“Well?” the man prodded again. He still had his fingers curling up and down along Jesse’s neck.

“I don’t know, Kenny,” Todd muttered. He spoke close to her hair, like he was trying to hide his face behind her curls. “I don’t really like the idea of raping her to make a point. It seems ungentlemanly.”

Andrea had to bite her lip to stop herself from laughing at the ridiculousness of that statement.

“Seems ungentlemanly to drag me out here in the middle of the night with this fucking crybaby rat and not give me something for my troubles,” Kenny said. He shoved Jesse’s face into the back of the seat, hard. It looked like he was trying to smother Jesse with the fabric.

“Well, I mean, I didn’t know she was going to send her kid away,” Todd said, a tad defensively. “But that means it’s good I didn’t just shoot her like you said I should. Then we’d have no good way to punish Jesse when he acts up.”

Kenny laughed again. “I know a few new things we could do to him. Bet he’d be singing like a bird by the end of it too.”

Jesse’s shoulders tensed.

“Todd,” said the man behind the wheel. “You gotta make a decision. This here is your business, you gotta be man enough to make the tough choices.”

The silence that followed was terrible.

“Don’t kill me,” Andrea said at once. It wasn’t begging, even though it sounded like begging, even though she wasn’t above begging if that’s what it took to make it out of this night alive.

This was strategy.

Kenny hadn’t taken his eyes off the low cut of her pajama top. Todd was still rubbing his knuckles along her ribs, lost in thought. She understood the situation well enough now to realize two things: Todd was in charge of the horrors this evening held in store and Todd was very new to being in charge.

She could work with that.

“Aww, Miss Andrea, it’s really not up to you,” Todd said apologetically. “Like I said, it’s nothing personal.”

Andrea forced a deep, shuddering breath in through her teeth. It caught on the way down and became a sob that she swallowed back as quickly as she could. Jesse flinched, trying with all his might to pull his face out of the seat cushions to look at her properly. He thrashed again, prompting a blow to the back of his head from Kenny that made Andrea wince.

“I-I mean, if you kill me it’ll be harder to make Jesse behave. I can make Jesse behave,” she said quickly. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt. She was afraid it would rip a hole right out of her chest.

“Yeah?” Todd asked. He leaned forward to appraise her curiously. “How would you do that?”

“I know how to keep men happy. Happy men behave,” Andrea replied. The words burnt like poison as they left her mouth.

Kenny laughed outright and slapped the back of Jesse’s head again. With another yank, he pulled Jesse back up against his chest. He dug the fingers of his right hand into Jesse’s chin once more, new bruises blooming to match the ones he’d put there earlier. His left hand, however, slid between Jesse’s legs.

Jesse made a high sound of surprise as he jerked violently. Kenny squeezed.

“What do you think, rat? She any good? It worth it to us to keep her around?” 

Jesse stared at Andrea, his wide eyes full of desperation. She knew he was trying to communicate something with her, but she couldn’t tell what and couldn’t let herself second guess this plan by putting the effort in to decode the raw emotions swimming in his gaze. He wasn't reacting to Kenny’s groping the way she’d imagine a man who’d never been touched that way before would react. Instead of thrashing and kicking and whaling, after the initial shock, Jesse just accepted the touch. Kenny didn’t let him go after making his point either. Instead, he rubbed a hand up and down Jesse’s chest as he looked at Andrea like he was giving her a preview of how this night might end for her. Todd watched Kenny’s wandering hands with blatant curiosity, glancing up at Jesse’s broken face with more interest than he’d shown anything else so far.

“Do you want her or do you want him?” Todd asked.

Kenny snorted. “What the fuck do you think?”

The question made something burning and angry and, above all, calm settle in Andrea’s chest.

She turned away from Jesse, letting her own eyes go wide and wet with fear. It wasn’t hard. She could feel her mind teetering between terror and action, ready to tip in either direction at the slightest provocation.

“I don’t want to die,” Andrea told Todd with total and complete honesty. “I’ll make Jesse be good. I’ll make you feel good too; just don’t kill me.”

Todd wasn’t remotely interested in Andrea’s offer. He wasn’t even interested when the driver gave a hooting laugh and called her a whore like it was the funniest thing he’d ever said. He didn’t seem interested when Kenny gave a satisfied, “fuck yes” from beside them, but when Jesse gave another strangled cry of pain Todd’s head swiveled to zero in on the sound. His tongue darted out to wet his lips.

Kenny shifted in the tight space. He shoved Jesse against the door and then, when Jesse lunged after him, he punched Jesse so hard his head bounced off the window. It left a smear of blood smudged across the glass.

“Hey now,” Todd said sharply, “Watch his head. If we break his brain he’s not going to be able to cook for us.”

“Fuck off with that bullshit,” Kenny began, but he was cut off by a sharp bark from the driver.

“Did I not just say this was Todd’s operation?” the driver demanded. “If Todd says not to bust the rat’s brains, you don’t bust them.”

“Fucking bullshit,” Kenny snarled under his breath loud enough for everyone to hear.

He slammed Jesse back into the seat once more when Jesse began to slide onto the floor. With more aggression that Andrea thought was possible, he pulled the seatbelt across Jesse’s chest and buckled him into the seat.

_Okay_ , Andrea thought. That was good. That meant Jesse was as safe as he was going to get for the moment. She forced herself not to panic as Kenny slid across the seat and reached out for her. She told herself not to scream when she felt his hands pulling at the ties of her bathrobe.

She told herself not to scream when Todd pressed his face up next to her cheek.

“Do you think this will make him cry again?” he asked her very quietly as Kenny’s calloused fingers shoved her shirt up to expose naked skin. “He looks kinda nice when he cries. His eyes get all big.”

Andrea closed her eyes, letting her hands slide back along Todd’s waist. Kenny’s breath ghosted over her skin. Wet. Oppressive.

Her fingers closed around the handle of the gun. “Yes,” she said. “This is going to make him cry.”

She pulled the gun free from Todd’s waistband as Kenny pulled her out of Todd’s lap and into his own. She let herself be moved, hiding the click of the safety sliding off with a hitched gasp as teeth bit into her flesh. She kept her eyes open as she pressed the barrel of the gun to Kenny’s gut and pulled the trigger.

The bullet ripped through Kenny’s flesh and into the front passenger’s seat. He screamed. Andrea screamed. Jesse flailed as blood and tissue splattered across his face. Fingers closed around her neck as Todd began to choke her one-handed. With the other, he struggled to pull the gun from her hand. Andrea flung her skull backward. Pain exploded in the back of her head. Todd cursed as she crushed his nose.

In the front seat, the driver bellowed a string of curses. He slammed the breaks. Andrea screamed again as she and Todd were thrown forward to hit the back of the driver’s seat. Her elbow crunched into the center console. Her arm went numb, but she did not drop the gun. Todd gave a low moan of pain. Andrea twisted, angled the gun behind her and pulled the trigger.

The sound was deafening. Wet warmth spread across her back and side.

The driver twisted in his seat. He pulled another gun from his long jacket. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, there was so much blood everywhere, she couldn’t get her gun up fast enough and--

Jesse kicked out, knocking Kenny--still screaming as he bled out--into the driver as the driver pulled the trigger. Andrea felt the burn of the bullet graze her cheek.

She screamed, terrified and pained and trying not to let the tears blind her as she swung Todd’s gun up and pulled down on the trigger. She wasn’t sure how many times she actually shot the driver. She wasn’t sure if it was the first or the second or even the third bullet that took off the side of the driver’s head. She wasn't sure which bullet tore out Kenny’s throat.

She couldn’t hear anything past the ringing in her ears. She thought maybe that was because of the gun, but she wasn’t sure. She was crying. Her whole body shook. She couldn’t stop looking at the empty space where half the driver’s skull used to be.

The first sound that came back to her when the ringing in her ears faded was the strangled gurgle of Todd choking as blood filled his lungs. The second sound was Jesse, struggling in his seat, shouting something over and over again behind his gag.

Jesse’s face was covered in new blood, like little red constellations against the purple and blue bruises. She could see the same terror she felt reflected in his eyes, but it was muted by something else. He tipped his head forward, looking at her from below his dark lashes. His eyes weren’t staying open the way they should, they kept slipping closed and it seemed like it hurt to open them again. He said something through the gag. His eyes moved from the gun in her hands to her face.

She let the gun drop to the floor of the SUV. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. It took three tries to straighten her sleep shirt and tie her bathrobe closed. It was covered in blood. She could still feel the brush of Kenny’s hands against her, the press of teeth into her skin. She wanted layers between herself and the world.

She scrambled across the seat and unbuckled the belt keeping Jesse in place. He collapsed into her to press his face against her neck and gasped in great shuddering breaths. She feared, for a short heartbeat, that she’d want to push him away. She wanted layers between herself and the world, but Jesse was not the world.

Jesse was hers.

Andrea untie the knot holding the gag in place. It left skin rubbed raw at the edges of his mouth, but Jesse didn’t seem to care about that, maybe he didn’t even notice. Her teeth chattered like there wasn’t enough warmth left in the entirety of the world to melt the chill in her gut now.

Jesse was a furnace.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he sobbed as she clung to him.

She wanted him to hold her back but he was still chained up. Behind them, Todd finally went quiet.

“Where are the keys?” she asked. And then, when the chattering of her teeth made the words almost incomprehensible, “Jesse, where are the keys to the handcuffs?”

He shook his head against her shoulder before pulling back. His eyes were red and wild. “Todd. Todd has them.”

It didn’t make sense for a long moment. She understood the words, understood what they meant individually, but cumulatively they made no sense. There was no way the dead body behind her could have anything to do with the keys that she needed to take those cuffs off Jesse, because then she’d need to actually look at that dead body behind her. It meant she'd have to look at the dead body across from her. Or the dead body in the front of the SUV.

She was alive. The bodies were not.

The keys were in the front pocket of Tod’s jeans. So was his cellphone. She pulled both free.

Andrea unlocked the cuffs around Jesse’s legs first. They were easiest to remove. The ones around his wrists were harder because Jesse had to twist all the way around for her to reach his hands locked behind his back. This close, she could see the blood matted in his hair from multiple gashes, she could see the full extent of the black and blue bruises around his neck.

White-hot anger flashed through her as she pulled the cuffs from around his wrists to reveal the bright red ring of raw skin hidden beneath them.

It was hard to pull the door open behind Jesse, and it was hard to herd him out of the SUV. Not because he didn‘t want to leave the SUV, but because he seemed to have lost the ability to control his body properly. His eyelids were dropping despite how rapidly he blinked them open, and his head kept listing to the side like it was too heavy to hold upright.

_All that blood_ , Andrea thought. _Even before they started hitting him._ _He needs a doctor._

Once they were out of the SUV, Jesse collapsed into her. He flung his arms around Andrea’s neck and pulled her close, his nose buried in the tumble of her hair.

“I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “I’m so sorry. Are you alright?”

She let him cry. There would be time for forgiveness later, when they weren’t sitting by the side of the road in the dead of night, covered in the blood of bodied still cooling in the vehicle beside them. Andrea cooed soothingly to Jesse, rubbing one hand up and down his spine--there were welts there, she could feel them under the fabric of his shirt--as she punched in a number she never thought she’d need to use.

The phone rang three times before the sharp voice on the other end said, “Detective Kalanchoe.”

“Detective Kalanchoe, this is Andrea Cantillo. I need your help.”

A beat of silence and then, “Ms. Cantillo. What happened?”

Andrea curled her fingers into the short hair at the base of Jesse’s skull. The tremors that coursed through his body made her teeth rattle as she said, “I need help. You said to call if someone tried to hurt my family.”

“Where are you now?” Detective Kalanchoe asked. She could hear something rattling in rustling in the background, like a pen racing across paper.

“I don’t know. They tried to abduct us.” She spread her palm flat against the back of Jesse’s neck. His arms slid down her sides to clutch at her bathrobe. He wept sorrow and desperate relief into her skin.

“We’ll find you,” Detective Kalanchoe said. There was not an ounce of uncertainty in his voice. “Don’t hang up. We can use the cell towers to find you.”

Andrea pulled the phone away from her face. He pressed the speaker button on the keypad and then set the phone down on the ground beside her bent knees. Once the phone was out of her hand, she curled her other arm around Jesse to hold him close.

“You’re alive,” he gasped. “You’re alive.”

“I’m alive,” she agreed, because it sounded like the thing he needed to hear right then. “I’m alive and so are you.”

For the first time since the knock on her front door pulled her out of her home, the little voice in Andrea’s mind quieted. It told her there would be time for horror over what she’d done later. There would be time to process her anger over what was done to Jesse, what they’d done to her. What they’d tried to do to her son.

But right now, she was alive. Jesse was alive. Brock was safe and far from here.

She would protect her family.


End file.
